Your ideas on the net negative outcome of a poor LN node are very interesting. I hadn't thought about them, thanks for sharing. I guess nodes and their implementations will also keep developing heuristics to avoid the bad apples. And perhaps reputation systems appear at some point (I think players like amboss are doing a great job in positioning themselves for these kind of roles).

And as for the profitability... Let's hope so. I frequently dream awake about what will happen when we see a massive jam at the mempool (December 2017 caliber). If things go as expected, the bottleneck at the mempool should both incentivize shifting transactions to LN (allowing node operators to increase fees and still get routing activity) and also make it more expensive to deploy new capital to open channels, again giving more gunpowder for the existing operators and channels to increase fees and benefits.

It feels a bit as if, nowadays, we live in a time where everyone can build a highway for free and no one charges much on cars going through their highways because there is barely any traffic. But if one day highways become prohibitively expensive to build and traffic suddenly spikes...

Oh well, let's keep on waiting to see how things unfold and enjoying the present as well. Thanks for the interesting discussion.